Dunes - Olivier van Herpt
Porcelain is considered the most highly regarded type of ceramic because of its delicacy, strength and brilliant whiteness. But traditionally it has been confined to small objects. Despite numerous efforts to unravel all the mysteries of porcelain, transcending distant times, cultures, and places, one last mystery remained unsolved even by its inventors: how to scale porcelain to large sizes.
Unlike other clays, porcelain softens in the kiln. Due to the weight porcelain reaches in large scales, larger objects collapse during firing. This inevitably results in cracks and deformations. To avoid collapse, those who did venture into large-scale work had to compromise the purity of the clay, using mixtures that melt less but loosen the properties of whiteness, translucency and finesse of porcelain. Or they restricted themselves to stable, balanced forms that require supports, or, most frequently, to self-supporting round forms.
Olivier van Herpt built a new 3D printer capable of forming the thinnest porcelain ever possible on a large scale, making it light enough to avoid collapsing in the kiln despite its size, thereby allowing for large-scale forms without the previous limitations.
